How to Install and Setup W3 Total Cache for Beginners

Want to install and configure W3 Total Cache on your WordPress website?

W3 Total Cache is a popular WordPress caching plugin that helps you improve your website speed and performance.

In this beginner’s guide, we’ll show you how to easily install and configure W3 Total Cache on your WordPress website.

Editor’s note: We no longer use W3 Total Cache on our website and have switched to WP Rocket which is a premium caching plugin. W3 Total Cache is still a nice solution that works well.

What is W3 Total Cache?

W3 Total Cache is one of the best WordPress caching plugins that can easily improve your WordPress performance and speed.

By default, WordPress uses PHP to dynamically generate every page on your website when requested by a user.

PHP is a server-side programming language. This means that each request from users increases the load on your server. This affects the performance, user experience, and SEO of your website.

WordPress caching plugins help you reduce this by skipping PHP and submitting a cached copy of your website.

It also lets you easily connect your website to a CDN (content delivery network) to further improve your website’s performance.

W3 Total Cache installed in WordPress

Before installing the W3 Total Cache plugin in WordPress, you should make sure that you disable another caching plugin on your website. This would help you to conserve server resources and prevent plugin conflicts.

Then you can go ahead and install and activate the W3 Total Cache best caching plugin for WordPress. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, W3 Total Cache will add a new menu item named ‘Performance’ to your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will launch the plugin setup wizard.

Just click the Next button to continue.

First, you will be prompted to enable Page Cache. Click the Test Page Cache button to continue.

W3 Total Cache will show you various storage engine options. You need to choose one that will save you the most time. Usually, it will be the ‘Disk: Enhanced’ option for most shared hosting platforms.

Click the Next button to continue.

You will now have the option to test Database Cache. We recommend choosing None. For most small to medium-sized websites, your MySQL server will be able to retrieve data faster than the database cache.

Click the Next button to proceed to the next step.

This will take you to the Object Cache section. Object Caching lets W3 Total Cache store dynamic query database queries and reuse them to improve performance.

If the test result shows a difference of only a few milliseconds, you can choose None.

Click the Next button to continue.

Then click on the Test Browser Cache button and then select the ‘Enabled’ option under the test results.

This option requires the user’s browsers to save a copy of the web page for a limited time. Loading a page from the browser cache is much faster than loading your web server’s cache.

Click the Next button to proceed to the next step.

Finally, the setup wizard will ask you to enable lazy loading for images.

Now comes WordPress with built-in lazy loading for images. Some older browsers may not support this feature.

W3 Total Cache uses JavaScript to add lazy loading images, which can be even faster and more efficient.

Then click the Next button to complete the setup wizard and view the W3 Total Cache dashboard.

Advanced Caching Options in W3 Total Cache

The basic settings would work for most websites. However, there are many advanced options that you can configure to further improve performance.

Let’s look at the most important.

Enhancing JavaScript and CSS in W3 Total Cache

The term ‘minify’ is used to describe a method that reduces the file size of your website. It does this by removing white spaces, lines, and unnecessary characters from the source code.

Note: Minifying JS and CSS files could potentially break your website. If you enable it and your website does not look good, just disable these options.

This best-caching plugin for WordPress also lets you easily minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML source code. However, we only recommend minimizing JavaScript and CSS files.

Just go over to the Performance »Minify page and scroll down to the JS section.

Select the box next to ‘JS minify settings’ to enable it.

Now scroll down to the CSS section and enable CSS minify settings in the same way.

Don’t forget to click the Save All Settings button to save your settings.

For alternative methods, see our guide on how to minimize JavaScript and CSS files in WordPress.

Enable CDN support in W3 Total Cache

CDNs as content delivery networks help you further improve your website performance by serving static files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript from a worldwide network of servers.

This reduces the load on your WordPress hosting server and improves the loading speed of the site.

W3 Total Cache comes with built-in support for various CDN platforms.

We recommend using Bunny.net, which is the best CDN solution on the market. This is what we use for our OptinMonster website.

First, you need to sign up for a Bunny.net account. After signing up, you will need to create a Pull Zone for your website.

A pull zone adds a hostname to Bunny.net CDN. This hostname is then used to serve static files for your website.

Add a name for your pull zone and then enter the domain name of your website.

After adding the pullzone, you should try the Performance »General Settings page and scroll down to the CDN section.

Select the Enable box next to the CDN option and select Generic Mirror next to the CDN type option.

Don’t forget to click the Save All Changes button to save your settings.

Next, you need to try the Performance »CDN page and scroll down to the Configuration: Objects section.

From here, you need to add the hostname you created earlier for your pull zone and click the test mirror button.

This will check the availability of your hostname and will display the Test Passed message if successful.

You can now click the Save All Changes button to save your settings.

It will now start serving you static resources from the CDN server.

W3 Total Cache also works well with Cloudflare free CDN. Alternatively, you can also use it with Sucuri, which is the best firewall service for websites with built-in CDN service.

Troubleshooting W3 Total Cache Issues

Once you have set up W3 Total Cache properly, it should work smoothly in the background to improve WordPress speed and performance.

Sometimes you may encounter issues where you do not see any changes you have made directly to your website, or a plugin may not work properly.

The most common reason for these problems is that you are probably seeing an old cached version of your website.

This can be easily repaired by clearing the cache in WordPress.

Just click on the Performance menu at the top and then select the Purge All Caches option. This plugin will clear all cached content on your website.

If you still see the old version of your webpage, try clearing your browser cache as well.

We hope this article helped you install and configure W3 Total Cache in WordPress. You can also view our complete WordPress Security Guide for Beginners to enhance your website security, or check out our comparison of the best GoDaddy alternatives that are cheaper and more reliable.

 

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